Carbon Offsets Given our meeting’s focus this year, we have attempted to calculate and mitigate the meeting’s carbon footprint. To come up with our carbon footprint, we took the zip codes from previous Forest Guild and Longleaf Alliance conferences and came up with an average travel distance for the meeting attendees. Carbon footprints for each distance were then calculated. To this we then added the anticipated carbon footprint for our hotel rooms and meals. We did not try to calculate the costs for printing or publications, or the field trips. We did, however, add in an additional few tons for the hot air that is inevitably released during happy hour. We investigated several options to offset our meeting's carbon footprint, and settled on a company called e-Blue Horizons, which creates offsets by capturing methane from landfills in New England. We chose them because of their cost effective approach, and because half of their net proceeds go to the Conservation Fund for reforestation projects. We encourage all attendees to add the carbon offset fee to their registration when filling out their conference registration form. More information on the specific projects funded through these offsets can be found in the Frequently Asked questions section of the Blue Horizons website.
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